Rugby dinosaurs need to leave their prehistoric views in the past
THE WRU described its move to offer its first contracts to women players as “historic” this week. Not before time. Such has been the dinosaur attitude to women’s rugby in Wales for so long, the more appropriate adjective has been prehistoric.
Some old keyboard woolly mammoths still can’t cope with this first step towards enabling Wales to compete with the nations who have recognised the importance of the women’s game for decades.
I’ve been quite concerned for the welfare of this poor chap commenting in response to the contracts announcement. He sounds genuinely frightened by the prospect of female sporting progress.
“I don’t want women in the men’s game, simple as that. I did not play rugby with women, I didn’t support the game with women and I don’t want to discuss the game with them,” he writes, adding: “This sounds awful I know but it is my escapism. I have no objections at all to women playing or supporting the game at all. They can watch men’s rugby if they wish that is fine. But I am not interested in listening to women giving opinion on the game. It spoils it for me. There is a massive divide between men and women’s rugby or the sport would be mixed. Good luck to the ladies but please leave us men alone.”
Maybe like the character played by Mike Bubbins in his new BBC Wales sitcom last night, this man has been frozen in time since the 1970s and propelled kicking and screaming into 21st century Wales to vent his ancient opinions.
But even in the 1970s these views would have been out of date. Welsh women have always been involved in what has been perceived as an entirely male pursuit. As the records show, as far back as 1884 “fully a third” of a 5,000-strong crowd at Stradey were female while the stand of the 19th century Cardiff Arms Park was renovated for “the comfort of the ladies”.
When the All Blacks arrived at Rodney Parade in 1905, a gobsmacked Daily Mail scribe reported that: “The average woman in Newport, judging from the expert feminine criticisms punctuating Saturday’s play, apparently knows as much of the science of rugby as any man.”
And they didn’t just spectate more than a century ago, they played. There is a wonderful photograph in the online Cardiff Rugby Museum of what is believed to be the oldest known image of a women’s rugby team – taken on December 15, 1917, before the Cardiff Ladies XV went out to meet their Newport rivals at the Arms Park.
Cardiff’s full-back that day was 17-year-old Maria Lillian Eley (née Evans). She was recommended as a candidate to be the first ever woman to enter the World Rugby Hall of Fame and lived to 106.
Asked for the secret of her longevity in an interview with the Penarth Times, she replied: “Rugby,” adding, “we loved it. It was such fun with us all playing together on the pitch, but we had to stop when the men came back for from the war, which was a shame. Such great fun we had.”
Women’s sport flourished in the First World War with teams of munitions workers embracing rugby and football. Swansea had a particularly strong women’s football squad and by 1920 the round ball game had become a massive crowd-puller. On Boxing Day of that year, 53,000 fans watched Dick Kerr’s Ladies beat rivals St Helen’s Ladies 4-0. The FA feared the female game might get too big for its boots. In 1921, it banned women from playing on Football League grounds – a ban that was enforced until 1969.
I’ve often wondered how different the world might have been if women’s team sport had been allowed to evolve naturally from those wartime years rather than being crushed – the parity that might have come from normalising female participation and encouraging talent with equal pathways of opportunity.
Because frankly we’re still waiting and more than 100 years later that seems preposterous.
There was another online reaction to the WRU contracts’ announcement which has stayed with me this week.
A young woman calling herself @CymruChloe tweeted: “When I was 11 we were asked in school what we wanted to be when we were older. I wrote that I wanted to be a professional rugby player and my English teacher laughed in my face and said: ‘But you’re a girl, that won’t happen’. Today changes that reaction, today means a lot... now when someone else writes that they want to be a rugby player it won’t matter what their gender is because that is an achievable goal.”
Chloe’s English teacher put me in mind of the senior WRU figure who I was introduced to as a young journalist as “the only woman in Wales who writes on rugby”.
“Yes, but can she read a map,” he snapped back – in irritation rather than “banter”. He’s long gone and I’ve got sat-nav, but more than 20 years ago he was representative of a particular culture of institutionalised blazerati sexism that struggled with the concept of women having any involvement with the national game, let alone playing it.
And for all Wales’ obsession with getting one over the Old Enemy, they were quite content back then to see English women’s rugby not only go from strength to strength but give a pathway to our female talent.
Paula George, for example. In 2002 she became the first woman to grace the cover of Rugby World magazine. A fearless full-back, with 75 caps – 30 as captain – she led England to Grand Slams and victory over New Zealand.
Her story inspired young players across the border as she described her path to elite sport from a tough childhood where she overcame family dysfunction and playground racism.
Paula – or Georgie as she’s affectionately known – remains an icon of English rugby... and she’s from Kenfig Hill. She could have been a heroine of the Welsh game, a household name galvanising Welsh girls a generation ago to take to the field.
But as, she explained in an interview before that 2002 Women’s Rugby World Cup, she “despaired” of the Welsh set-up at the time and was embraced by an English women’s rugby culture that took female participation seriously.
It’s a despair recognised almost 20 years later by today’s Welsh women
This is only one, albeit important, part of the jigsaw as we look to ensure we have a first-class international women’s programme DIRECTOR OF RUGBY, NIGEL WALKER
When I was 11 we were asked in school what we wanted to be when we were older. I wrote that I wanted to be a professional rugby player and my English teacher laughed in my face and said: ‘But you’re a girl, that won’t happen’. Today changes that reaction, today means a lot... now when someone else writes that they want to be a rugby player it won’t matter what their gender is because that is an achievable goal @CYMRUCHLOE VIA TWITTER
players – until recently a fully amateur team on a two-year-losing streak, missing a head coach yet again.
It’s a despair that could be seen in the tears of captain Siwan Lillicrap, breaking down in the post-match interview after giving her all in Wales’ 45-0 thumping by Ireland in April.
It’s a despair that coloured the departure of the former skills coach and former Welsh captain Rachel Taylor, who later spoke of her “traumatising” time in the role.
It’s a despair that was visible in the Instagram post of Jasmine Joyce, one of the brightest stars of global rugby per se – not just the women’s game – when she wrote of the difficulty of balancing dreams of playing worldclass rugby with a full-time job.
And it’s a despair that fuelled a 4,000-signature petition and drove 123 former players to write a coruscating letter to the WRU declaring: “Your systematic dismantling of the age-grade and development pathways contributes significantly to the failures of the women’s game in Wales today. The results of the last two Six Nations are a product of the current environment which brings us to a crisis point we have feared was inevitable.”
Little wonder that the WRU’s new director of rugby Nigel Walker admitted the union had not “covered itself in glory” where the women’s game was concerned. But they have listened. And it was encouraging to hear Nigel say women’s rugby is at “the front and centre” of his focus while his background in athletics, multisport performance and media governance brings a fresh and equable culture to rugby development.
Ten full-time contracts, up to a further 15 players on retainers, plus match and training fees is a step in the right direction. A year from the World Cup, there are set to be further staff appointments around performance lifestyle advice, psychology and other sciences, along with initiatives to grow the top end of the game in Wales.
Nigel Walker added: “This is only one, albeit important, part of the jigsaw as we look to ensure we have a first-class international women’s programme. We will continue to add expertise to the management structure and we are also working hard behind the scenes on steps to make sure we have a robust player pathway to underpin the top level. We are in the process of recruiting a Head of Age Grade along with coaches to run U18 and U20 sides for both the male and female game and establishing the best competition structure to develop those players.”
It’s a start and one that might finally turn despair into hope for Welsh women’s rugby.